Starting in March 2021, IU will no longer offer online storage through Box. The university has begun the migration of all files from Box to Microsoft OneDrive or Google Drive.
Dan Calarco, chief of staff for the IU Office of the Vice President for Information Technology, Chief Information Officer and chair of the Box task force, released a statement June 3 explaining why the university is not renewing its Box contract.
Box is ending its unlimited storage offering and is raising the contract price over 1,000% over the next three years.
“...We were put between a rock and a hard place: undertake a very disruptive move or pay a price that would likely make Box the most expensive single piece of software at IU,” Calarco said in the statement.
If students, staff or faculty didn’t fill out a survey to choose which service to have their data migrated, University Information Technology Service is moving it to Microsoft OneDrive. UITS is notifying people a week before moving their Box data to another storage software.
The university must move all data out of Box before the contract expires, which has become especially difficult with COVID-19. Online traffic has increased and slowed the speed of transferring data to Microsoft OneDrive and Google Drive. If data is not moved by March 2021, all the data becomes read-only.
A UITS information page on the migration says the university has so much data on Box it will take around four months to move it all. It does not say how much that time has increased since data traffic escalated due to COVID-19.
UITS is presenting webinars and videos and developing FAQs in order to help people learn about data migration.
